Is Ghana Stuck At Tano Basin?

Since commercial production commenced with the deepwater Jubilee field in December 2010, Ghana has ranked prominently on the hydrocarbon map of the world.
It looks likely to record average 2013 production in excess of a hundred thousand barrels of crude oil per day as Jubilee ramps up to peak of 120,000BOPD.
But all the current production, planned production and drilling successes are clustered around the Tano Basin and its sub-basin: the Cape Three Points.
Any step out of the Tano, into another basin has so far resulted in failure.
The UK listed Afren Corp., has felt the full brunt. Barely six months after it acquired 68% interest in Keta Block on the Accra Keta basin, Afren spudded Cuda 1. It came out unsuccessful.
The company beamed with optimism after the failure, saying that the block, located farther east, towards the Ghanaian border with the Republic of Togo, had both Tertiary and Cretaceous prospectivity, with the principal exploration focus being the Cretaceous Albian to Campanian sections. “The block offers multiple prospects and leads, with a variety of trapping and depositional settings. A number of these show potential for significant stratigraphic trapping and giant field potential”, Afren enthuses on its website. In 2011, Afren farmed out 35% participating interest and operatorship to Italian major Eni, who in turn drilled a well within a year of buying in.
Eni’s well, Nunya-1X(formerly named Cuda 2) was a spectacular failure. It didn’t encounter a drop of hydrocarbon and more, it gave the lie to Afren’s claims that Cuda-1 would have encountered oil if it had drilled deeper.
Apart from the Afren/Eni adventure in Keta, there hasn’t been drilling on any other basin outside the Tano. The Saltpond basin still delivers trickles (less than 500BOPD) through the Saltpond filed. Operators have not ventured to drill in the deepwater Saltpond/Central Basin, which is the country’s third prominent deepwater basin.
Still, who cares whether these other basins deliver, as long as there’s continuing success in the Tano Basin?
A field development plan of a 100,000BOPD(peak) has been submitted to government.
The Plan Of Development (POD) looks to bring together a cluster of fields collectively named TEN(Twenoba, Enyenra and Ntomme).
Another such cluster of fields, the MTAB(Mahogany, Teak, Akasa and Banda) is in pre-development plan stage and is expected to deliver 100,000BOPD at peak.
Both projects, located in Deepwater Tano/Cape Three Points Blocks, envisage the crude to be produced through an FPSO each. They are also, both, being operated by the British explorer Tullow Oil, with partners including American independents Anadarko and Kosmos Energy.
Meanwhile, Eni, which has failed in Accra Keita, announced a successful find in the Offshore Cape Three Points(OCTP), in the Tano Basin early in 2012, testing 5,000BOPD of “high quality oil” from a gross oil column of 76metres.
And Hess Corp, reported, in 2012, its fifth discovery in Deepwater Tano-Cape Three Points License. The company reported that Pecan 1 follows the previously reported discoveries at Almond (16metres net oil pay), Beech (44metres net oil pay), Hickory North (30 metres net gas-condensate pay), and Paradise (37metres net oil pay and 90 metres net gas-condensate pay). Ghana has had a good five years, since the discovery of Jubilee(2007-2012) in terms of overall oilfield activity relating to both the drillbit and the commercial playground: almost as soon as Tullow Oil announced the discovery of the Twenoboa held, proving that the deepwater oil tank extends beyond Jubilee, news filtered in about ExxonMohil s interest in acquiring Kosmos Energy’s stake in Jubilee for $4billion. The reputation of the putative buyer and the amount of money on the table heightened the perception of profitability of the overall Ghanaian portfolio. But beyond the Deepwater Tano and Cape Three Points blocks and adjacent acreages, what other acreages can be prospective enough to interest any company? The Tano Basin itself was a grave yard of hopes just 15 years ago, until Kosmos, Anadarko and Tullow started re-interpreting the data differently from earlier explorers. Kosmos itself described the Tano Basin as a bad address only six years ago.

sure, but it would be far better spent geinttg ready for what replacing oil with something that has 1/10th the energy density which is what we face using alternativesthis means that whatever assumptions people have about our current lifestyle and way of life need to be thrown out the window cause they simply are not feasible with alternativeswe are not going to power 250 million cars or the incredibly profligate housing we use or convert oil into foodThese are huge problems, thinking innovation is going to make the physics involved go away or the conclusions it forces on the situation change is naive. Innovation won’t deal with the basic psychology of man either. Fundamentally this is a social problem not a technological one. Energy could be unlimited and man would still over consume what the planet provides even faster right into a die off situation. Energy is limited though and man is still doing the same. This is a social problem. The forced realization of finite and very limited and dwindling energy supplies carries some very severe penalties and consequences. The gap between alternatives vs what we enjoy now is bigger than what can be bridged using alternatives. In other words consumption is going to come down and it is going to come down rather drastically. Nothing wrong at all with pursuing alternatives with all due haste, but it is vitally important to understand what can and cannot be done and where we can go with this. This means had better start investing in a lifestyle that will survive the transition because little of we do now is going to make it thru. You seem as others do to always imply that technology can solve our problems, it can’t. It isn’t even close. Oil production is limited by physics no matter what technology is brought to bear. All mined resources are. Technology doesn’t address man’s long history of zero foresight either. Man typically simply cannot fathom dwindling resources and energy, it’s the way we are wired. This must be overcome. Is all this insurmountable? nope, wanna see what part of our future looks like? take a look at Cuba and look up their history.When the USSR fell apart all their client states lost their shipments of oil with about 30 days warning. They survived but people starved, Cuba is now far different than it was before. We face a similar but slightly slower transition but not only on a far grander scale but the change in our energy consumption is ten time bigger. Dwindling oil production and the land export model puts us on a collision course of exports to us being cut off in around 25-30 years. How well or easy do you think it will be to go from 20 million barrels of day of oil to 4 million barrels per day in that time frame? Do you grasp what this means and implies?